The Stages of Legal Maturity
At Checkbox, we created a maturity model for legal service request management, from an unorganized cost center to a valued strategic business partner.
Legal intake and triage automation maturity measures the current state or level of an organization’s ability in managing its legal service delivery. The various stages of maturity describe how requests are being managed and indicate the opportunity for service delivery optimization and readiness for automation.
At Checkbox, we created a maturity model for legal service request management.
Stage 0 (Adhoc & Unorganized)
Stage 1 (Centralized Inbox)
Stage 2 (Standardized Intake Form)
Stage 3 (Automated Intake & Triage)
Stage 4 (Self-service Automation)
At this stage, legal requests come in highly unstructured with little or no organization at all. Service request management is typically chaotic, as there is no way to properly triage the information as requests come through. Legal is slowed down greatly in this stage as they must manually sort through requests individually to assign them to the lawyer that can properly resolve the request.
Where are request coming from?
Request are ad hoc, coming from a mix of instructed channels such as instructed channels such as email, Slack/Teams messages, and phone calls.
Pain Points at Stage 0:
Business users are confused as to where to access legal assistance and services since there is no clear process or place to raise a request.
Business users are not precise in how they instruct legal on their requests, resulting in inefficient back and forth clarifications required in order to fulfil the request.
non-legal related requests, turning legal into the organization’s help desk. For example, a business user asking legal a question that should be addressed by HR or procurement.
In larger legal teams, resource allocation is a challenge, where requests aren’t being assigned efficiently based on lawyer specialization or capacity.
There is no data capture and therefore no visibility for legal into the volume and status of workflows and legal requests, making it impossible to measure and communicate service quality.
Are you ready to elevate your legal service delivery?
Stage 1 is where a centralized channel for legal requests has been introduced for business users to submit their requests. This stage usually emerges when the volume of legal work becomes so high and impossible to manage, that the legal team is pressured to rethink how they can streamline their service intake. Advancement to this stage is also catalyzed by a growing legal team where work is done across multiple lawyers. Unlike Stage 0, engaging with the legal team to raise a request is much less confusing since the requests are all directed to one location. It also allows some data capture since the number of requests can be counted, albeit with very manual effort.
Where are requests coming from?
Requests are directed to a legal-specific channel e.g. legal@company.com inbox or #legal Slack / Teams channel.
In Stage 1, teams may also feature a resource who manually monitors the inbox, possibly tracking requests on a spreadsheet, and triages the requests as they come in based on the lawyer with the best fit for the request type or capacity.
Pain Points at Stage 1:
There is still a lot of back and forth between the requestor and legal to ensure the completeness of information.
The consistency, structure, and criteria for requests is still lacking.
Requests are still manually triaged and allocated to lawyers in the team which requires human effort and coordination.
Lawyers who share the same inbox can end up doubling up on work, leading to wasted time.
Request data is manual with no automated reporting or status tracking and visibility.
Stage 2 is where legal requests are submitted via a standardized form, enabling legal teams to start seeing some consistency with legal requests. The requests populate a spreadsheet or dashboard that an admin can easily manage. The forms provide a streamlined way to capture information, build in controls and validation, and automates the reporting of metrics including the volume & type of requests.
Requests are submitted via an intake form (Google Forms, Matter Management System) in a centralized location, where lawyers must still filter requests and manually assign them.
Pain Points at Stage 2:
There is still a lot of manual work given the lack of automated triage, requiring a dedicated resource who must filter & assign requests.
There may be initial adoption challenges as the business may be required to change their behaviour in how they interact with legal.
Stage 3 is where legal teams go beyond just intake and implement automated triage. By leveraging decision trees based on business rules and routing logic, requests are automatically triaged to the most appropriate lawyer or resource based on considerations such as capacity, request complexity, and specialization. This includes automatically redirecting non-legal requests to other parts of the business, completely removing the administrative overhead of capturing and allocating requests. Visibility and reporting on requests are automated and extended to also measure the on-going status of workflows. Having an overview of all requests gives important legal data such as:
The time it takes to fulfill a legal request
The status of the workflow of the request
Who made the request
Who the workflow is currently with (not necessarily legal)
This data provides the much needed visibility of the throughput and workload across the legal team, helps justify resourcing needs, and enables better reporting to the business.
Pain Points at Stage 3:
Change management remains a challenge if the business is required to change the way they engage with legal. A key mitigating factor here is enabling intake from within existing business systems (e.g. Salesforce) through integration.
Stage 4 expands from the previous stage of automated intake and triage to introduce self-serve capability. Legal can now leverage the infrastructure of their intake and triage system to create a ‘digital front door’ that not only organises and allocates work, but also allows some of that work to get done. Not all requests require legal team time as seen in the figure below. After the deployment of self-service tools, time is given back to legal, allowing them to shift their attention from low-value to high-impact work. The business also wins with faster turnaround times. This is how a scalable legal department is built, with request management and request resolution both being conducted effectively.
The full picture for data is also unlocked, with not only request data available but also the metadata behind the automated, self-service journeys. This data not only enables better management and transparency to demonstrate the value of legal, but enables legal to come to the strategic table with unique business insights.
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